


The Will To Go On When I'm Hurt Deep Inside

by CatChan



Series: Take Their Breath Away [6]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Race Changes, F/M, Gen, Native American Steve Rogers, Period-Typical Racism, Stubborn Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-28
Updated: 2015-11-28
Packaged: 2018-05-03 19:15:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5303474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatChan/pseuds/CatChan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>♫ “I can give you the force of my ancestral pride,<br/>The will to go on when I'm hurt deep inside,<br/>Whatever the feeling, whatever the way,<br/>It helps me go on from day to day” ♪</p><p>– Jean-Jaques Goldman: 'Je te donne' – </p><p>Steve Rogers has stunning blue eyes, made even more striking by the red-tinted tan And black hair he inherited from his Native mother.<br/>Now, depending on when you ask, he might be described as this skinny and short boy... Wait, Man?... Maybe, hard to say when he's not taller than the average middle-schooler... Always sick, or struggling to breath in, or avoiding sun like the plague because he burns in a flash despite his skin color, and always fighting back to whatever bullying he's subjected to despite how unlikely he is to win.</p><p>Or you might be told about the courageous man who became a Hero despite the risks, who always win, and whose posters picture with feather-full hairs flying in the breeze, with the picture of  a bald eagle as a backdrop.</p><p> </p><p>The truth about Steve Rogers is at once more complicated, and a lot simpler.</p><p>Steve Rogers is just a kid from Brooklyn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Will To Go On When I'm Hurt Deep Inside

**Author's Note:**

> The title is an originally English line in the lyrics of the French song [Je te donne, by Jean-Jaques Goldman](https://youtu.be/493R05ifNsI), and recently [reloaded by the collective Génération Goldman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjud3Ue-pFE) as a tribute (no, the original singer isn't dead yet, but I think he appreciates the tribute more while he's alive)

Steve didn't understand at first, why the boys were always making fun of him, looking him strangely even when he wasn't having an asthma crisis. He knew he was different, but he didn't understand how, or why.

His mother explained that it was because he wasn't white, that he got that from her. He already knew that, no one had their skin-tone in the neighborhood, but why did the others have to be mean just for that?

His mother told him that people were afraid of differences, that it was just because they didn't know him, but that if he wasn't mean, they'd understand that he was just like them.

Steve listened to his mother, but it didn't really work. He didn't tell her more, though, because he didn't want her to apologize that he was like her. She had done that last time he caught a huge cold. He hadn't liked that at all.

 

 

When he was six, he asked his mother again. He wanted to know what “redskin” meant. He didn't really understand why people used “red” to define him, he wasn't even really red skinned, just had a bit of a tan. And he didn't know why it seemed to be an insult. How could an adjective about your skin be an insult?

His mother told him of the American story that night, of how pioneers came on the land, but there was already people there, that they were darker than the settlers, with a red hint to the tan instead of the brown or yellow that can be seen elsewhere on earth. She told him that the white people caused the death of a good part of the natives, and made the others live on their own in defined spaces. She told him that it was quite some time ago, but people didn't want to think their fathers or grandfathers had been wrong, so they wanted to believe the natives had been bad guys.

She told him the way to prove them wrong was to not be a bad guy.

Steve hadn't really understood, but he'd said yes. It made his mother smile, so he thought it was the good choice.

He didn't accept to be insulted, though. He didn't run, and even if he ended up getting beat up, he wouldn't let anyone add “coward” to the list of imagined offenses the people found in him.

 

 

When he was seven, he finally asked his mom why they weren't in reserves with the other Indians.

So she explained how she had been taken in by a nunnery when she was small after most of her tribe died of diseases. She told him they forbid her from talking her mother tongue, they called her Sarah, and taught her the things white girls learn.

She said she couldn't even remember her birth name. She said she couldn't go back to her tribe, or to other tribes because she was too different from them, even if physically she looked the same. She said she wasn't angry at the nuns. She said they had tried to do what they thought was best for her. She told him even the best intents didn't always lead to good things, but the past is the past and there is no use dwelling in it. She told him that now, she only had to go forth. She told him that she had him and it made everything worth it.

Steve mulled that over. He still thought he'd like to live with other Indians, where he wouldn't be picked on just because of his skin tone.

Mom asked him if he was really sure. She told him that he was half white, and that the native were resentful to white people. She said they were right between the two worlds and that for now, it meant they belonged in none of them.

Steve thought it was sad.

 

 

Later, he asked about his father. He knew that he was dead, and that he had been white. But Steve wanted to know more about him.

Mom was happy to tell him about his dad. She said he had been Irish. That he wasn't born in America, and that he had looked at her without prejudice and that she had fallen in love with him. She told Steve that they had been happy and they had really loved each-other, and that when the war started in Europe, he had decided he didn't want to let people fight on their own.

He had gone to the front and he had been killed, but mom still had Steve, so she remembered him. Steve had his father's jaw, she said. And his blue eyes.

And he burnt in the sun despite his dark skin just like his milky white father used to.

 

 

Steve had only really understood the scale of the discriminations after he became friend with Bucky.

The friendship with Bucky had come from yet another brawl. When Steve had told that to his mom, she had just sighed and hung her head, with a faint smile at the corner of her mouth.

He had been gritting his teeth, fist balled, as the team of school bullies was heaping insults on him yet again. Steve refused to attack first. He answered and maintained his pride, but only started hitting after someone hit him first. It was his code, the way to follow his mom's advices without backing down from the fight.

So he was waiting for one insult he could make a sarcastic comeback to. But then, a white boy, with dark hair had stepped right in front of the bullies and said that it was way better to be Indian than to be the result of an unlucky cross between a scumbag and a coward who could only be courageous in a group and against a lone skinny kid.

The brawl had started, and Steve had jumped in because the boy had been trying to help him and he wouldn't just leave him get beat up all alone for it.

They both got beaten up.

Steve made his first good friend.

 

And then he had spent some time at Bucky's home and he had seen that they were three kids, two parents, and they worked not as long as mom, but they were all better dressed than Steve and mom were.

When he had asked mom why, she had just sighed and told him that her boss didn't think that she was worth as much as a white woman, even less so than a white man, so she was paid less, even if she did as much as a man. But she still had to do her hardest to prove that she wasn't just useless.

Steve didn't understand why it was that her life was so hard when she was always so nice and good and didn't deserve it at all.

“Life is not all fair” was the answer he got.

 

 

Steve grew up. Well, as a figure of speech. He became older, and gained a pair of pounds and three inches.

Bucky, him, really grew up. His figure became fuller, and his assurance with it. He also became stronger, and soon, it wasn't Steve and Bucky getting beat up any more, it was Steve getting beat up and Bucky saving him. Steve didn't like it all that much, he didn't want to be a burden. But Bucky didn't make him feel like a burden, he genuinely just wanted to help Steve.

Steve was grateful he had Bucky, or he would have thought all the white people were bad. But here was his best friend, always helping him out, and always ready to spend his time with him even if he had better things to do.

Steve liked Bucky. He really did.

He just didn't like how he always felt like he was dragging him down.

 

 

As soon as he could, Steve tried to get a job, relieve a bit of pressure from his mother as he tried to get into art college (not all that easy, for a not white man). It proved pretty hard to achieve, but he managed to get half hours in some factory, tucked away in a dark corner, and made do with it.

When his mother died, Bucky was here, offering his shoulder for Steve to lean on and cry if he wanted. Steve had thanked him, but didn't let himself take the easy road. He probably should have.

It was about then that Steve started to grow his hair out, as a memory of his mother's origins. After all, he had to deal with narrow minded racists all the time, a hairdo wouldn't make it all that worse.

Bucky started to say he could measure Steve's courage by the length of his hair. It was true that the mix of the long hair, skinny frame and protruding facial feature (even those he got from his father) described him pretty obviously as a Native American, his blue eyes the only hint that he wasn't all Indian.

Steve wore it with pride.

Then, came the war, then Pearl Harbor, and Bucky went and enrolled in the army while Steve's racial traits and ailments kept him out.

 

 

As he got beat up in the alleyway behind the theater for asking his neighbor to tone down during the news, he wondered somewhat bitterly if he’d be roughed up the same way had he been white skinned with short blond hair. He made it another reason to stand back up. If he started to run, he’d never stop.

Bucky swooped in and saved him. Again. And it hurt to feel that helpless once again, but he was still happy to see his friend after the month they’d spent apart.

Once again, Bucky talked him into a date, tried to cheer him, but it all failed pretty spectacularly.

At least, Steve met the doctor Erskine who wasn’t biased and managed to sign in the army.

 

 

At basic, Steve expected to be asked to cut his hair, but the woman who was in charge of the newcomers, agent Carter, only shouted that he was expected to keep his hairdo neat and tidy at all times, and pin it up into a bun for the exercises. He learned how to make a braid at the back of his head without a mirror and how to pin it after curling it at the nape of his neck, and felt very grateful he had a woman as drill instructor. He was pretty sure the Colonel would have ordered that he had them cut if doing that hadn’t undermined the agent’s authority. That was one of the important things to be in command, he understood, never give contradicting orders.

The fact that the rules for female soldiers applied to him on the hairdo front earned him a few new nicknames, but he was vastly immune to insults by then. In fact, the digs on his masculinity were almost refreshing compared to the usual ones he had from his race.

In all truth, basic was hell, between his asthma, his tendency to toast under the sun and how easily he could catch diseases but still refused to call in sick for them, he only made it through thanks to his pigheadedness.

And then, he jumped on a grenade and saw the Doctor Erskine smile.

 

 

The super-soldier transformation process was incredibly painful, and he had to use all the tricks he learned along his very numerous illnesses to hold through the whole procedure. And then it stopped, and the pinpricks left him gradually. Agent Carter asked how he felt and he could only give a weak answer as he reeled from the sudden painlessness. Some things he wasn’t even noticing anymore had been fixed. Taking a really full breath was so different now...

And then a shot rang and Erskine collapsed.

 

 

When they decked him in a flag costume, Steve managed to veto the ‘Indian chef headpiece’ because his costume designer was pretty nice and agreed to his logic that he couldn’t mock his origins that way. Instead, she made him a dozen of braids, dismantled the coif and secured the red white and blue colored eagle feathers in them. It was still ridiculous, but Steve found it at least a little more respectful of his ancestors.

At first it was awkward, he felt off-balance and self-conscious, and if his frame got larger, he didn’t look any less like a Native, he had just switched from the skinny Indian boy cliché over for the duff Indian man one.

The propaganda turned it into an argument, a colored man to beat the Arian obsessed Nazis. Steve, on his side was very conscious that along with this discourse, his superiors were capitalizing on his still being half white. The very close up portraits and the way they had taken the habit of drawing his irises bigger than real and with just a tiny black dot in the center to emphasize his blue eyes didn’t fool him for a second.

He was a little angry on that front, but he figured he had two parents and should accept the heritage from both.

 

 

He was once asked what his Indian name was. he would have been happy to be asked if not for the way the reporter had formulated the question, so that he could feel like a zoo animal instead of a real human. He answered a bit roughly that he didn't have one, and that thanks to the “reintegration” program, his mother didn’t have the knowledge needed to give him one, she hadn’t even remembered hers.

His publicity lead tried to have him sit in a film where he would meet an Indian shaman and be given a Native American name. They wanted him to be named Eagle-Of-Justice.

Steve put his foot down on it HARD, and refused to move a single inch. he would not turn native culture into a circus act, and if they tried to do it anyway, they could always try to shoot the scene without him in it.

 

 

Despite the bumps on the road, he took confidence in his act, so much that when he was sent over on the front, the reality felt like a baseball bat being forced in his stomach.

Then he heard about Bucky’s disappearance and it was like he lost his stomach completely.

 

 

He disobeyed orders, subordinated Agent Carter and stole Stark, them stood parliamentarians up for his own medal of honor. He had never felt so alive than then.

The only shadow to the picture was how guilty he felt about flirting with Peggy.

It felt wrong, somehow, to regard her as a woman when she fought so hard to have the same chances as a man. Especially coming from him who had struggled so much to be regarded as more than just a savage redskin.

She set him right on that point, on the fact that because she was a soldier she didn't stop being a woman, after she cooled down from the kissing incident.

 

 

When Stark presented him his new uniform and weapons, he also gave him a fringe with real eagle feathers attached to leather strings to put on the back of his helmet, “handy if he needed to hole up and camouflage his flashy outfit”.

Steve liked the feathers a lot more that way. They seemed less like a joke and more like something that had a real use.

 

 

He went in the battlefield, fought harder than he ever had before, using all the tricks he'd learned when he was thin and scrawny, and all the strength he had gotten with the serum.

For once, he wasn't holding Bucky down, for once he could take point without a worry that his friend would rush in and take a punch in his stead.

 

They freed camp after camp, fighting and waiting and taking orders together. He had never felt more at ease than with the Howling commandos. With this bunch of other outcasts, other people that would have been bullied just like him had they grown up in Brooklyn, he never had to wonder if one of them would dislike him for his skin color. Not with a French, two Englishmen, an Asian, a Black guy and Bucky.

They probably counted as a bunch of misfits back home, they normally wouldn't even be spared the time of the day to even say their names, but here, on the ground, as Captain America's elite team, they were treated as heroes, and everyone back home knew their name.

Steve found it sad that it was in the worse conditions that people could be more human... Unless it was a sign that things weren't actually that bad? If people had held on to racism even when people they discriminated against were saving their asses, it would have been utterly discouraging.

 

They fought hard and long, and it was war, of course it was hard and long and sometimes downright discouraging, and sometimes what they saw made them want to throw up, and sometimes they arrived to late to save people, and sometimes they saw allies dying, and sometimes they had nightmares where they saw the face of each enemy they had killed asking them why. And they answered, of course they answered, but it didn't feel like their reasons were enough... At least until the next time they were in battle conditions and they had to kill someone or let one of their own die.

Sometimes they were cold or sopping wet, sleeping on hard ground and eating disgusting army rations.

But each time they went out on an op, they had each-other's backs, and in the adrenaline and camaraderie, these brushes with death made them feel even more alive.

And then, Bucky fell from the train, and it was like the life had just straight up left Steve.

 

 

He finished the mission, went back to base, reported, and tried to drink his new body into haziness.

It failed.

Peggy spoke to him, and he tried to listen to the words she was saying, but the gap inside him was louder, drowning her words out in pain. Still, he loved Peggy, and he didn't want to worry her needlessly, so he did his best to look like he was listening to her, then left her drag him back to his barracks and force him to sleep.

He didn't sleep, but it was okay.

 

When the morning came, he'd dried up his tear ducts, and his enhanced metabolism had even repaired the red puffiness in and around his eyes and the dizziness so much crying should have caused didn't even appear.

At breakfast, Colonel Phillips told them he'd pried the location of the Hydra stronghold out of Zola.

They all suited up and trooped in or on their vehicles.

Stories usually talked about a blur when the hero was fighting while sleep-deprived and sad as a loveless Christmas. Steve didn't live this battle in a blur, it was all crystal clear to his eyes, incredibly sharp, movement after movement, punch after kick after shot, he was even better than ever, more out of his body, less involved in the action, but more intellectually focused.

His brain was running at it's highest, and so when the plane was rolling down the take off and Colonel Phillips gave him a lift to jump on it, he could tell they'd catch up.

Peggy kissed him, and his mind snapped back in to his body. He hesitated, half frozen, until Phillips told him he wasn't kissing. The joke shook him out of it, and he jumped on the plane.

 

 

When he stood alone at the hull, Red Skull dissolved into a vortex and bombs strapped in that deadly abomination, he fiddled with the radio, putting in the standard not so secret frequency.

He couldn't tell why he did that, he was already considering his options. He could maybe turn around, or try to land, but there was too much risk, the aircraft bombs could be shaken loose and fly to their target on autopilot, he could very well miss the landing and crash down with a hellish explosion, there could be a failsafe in case the plane turned around...

He could, maybe, have found a way to save himself. But he preferred to stay on the safe side and scarify himself so there wouldn't be any risk of other causalities.

Bucky would have disapproved.

As he set Peggy's picture on the dash and inched the pilot stick down, he wondered how much of a yelling he would be good for if afterlife was a thing.

He flirted with Peggy until the last moment.

At these latitudes, sky horizon and sea blended together. He didn't actually see the ground coming up. There was just the crash, the shock wave, and then the water rushing in.

And then black.

 


End file.
